143 / 164
143
plant utilisation, maximise net profit
(“not necessarily sales but net profit”),
and the company is successfully doing
that, more or less through its efficien-
cy.
“The government doesn’t seem to
support manufacturing; it says the
cost of wages is too high. I think this is
broad and sweeping statement. Wag-
es are high, but so is the cost of living,”
Dodson states.
“If you put in measures of efficiency
and get you unit costs of production
down, maybe use a 25 tonne reactor
instead of a 5 tonne one, those kinds
of labour costs can be reduced.”
And as such, that’s how Tollman op-
erates. The company has a very lean
overhead of staff. It streamlines as
much as it can and there aren’t too
many bums on seats:
“Most of our people are in the facto-
ry, producing.”
In fact, in the future, for some of its
packaging lines, the company will be
looking at using robots to reduce la-
bour, “and that’s one way of increasing
your profit” Dodson rationalises.
Growth
P
roduct
D
evelopment
In terms of keeping the business go-
ing, and indeed growing, Dodson is
heavily focused on not just the devel-
opment of its existing workstreams,
but on creating new ones. As such, the
business has and does continue to
see the benefits:
“Our sales increased remarkably last
year, they’ve plateaued a little bit, but
they should climb again next year,”
says Dodson.
Whilst Tollman has been in the field
of manufacturing general chemicals
for a long time, that which is its base-
line, it has since become heavily in-
volved in agricultural herbicide man-
ufacturing (as previously mentioned).
Furthermore:
“This year, we’ve got another busi-
ness starting where all the products
are made by Tollman, but marketed
through this new business.” These
products are wetting agents used in
conjunction with herbicide in an agri-
cultural field.
Another big advancement on the Toll-
man agenda: a year and a half ago,
Dodson hired a highly skilled technol-
ogy development specialist who has
been key in developing a number of
products for Tollman. One of these be-
ing a product Dodson described as
being as “better than anything on the
market”, but furtively, and understand-
ably, he cannot say much more until
the product is released.
The company also has a product de-
velopment chemist onsite creating ad-
ditional products in quite a variety of